Pollock knew he had to slay the giant (Picasso) before American art could be free. And it was with his swirling, lassoing, cosmic drip paintings that he did it. You think you’re so modernistic and groundbreaking? Take that, Pablo! Picasso was at first amused and then dismissive of Pollock’s paintings (mere decoration, he called them, and bizarrely enough those socks-in-the-nose of Abstract Expressionism do look strangely ornamental now).

Curiously, Picasso had anticipated the spinning skeins of Pollock’s drip paintings (actually a lot of people had dripped and splattered before Pollock, but nobody dripped like him—as if his life depended on it) in a series of illustrations for Balzac’s novel, Le Chef d’oeuvre inconnu. The novel’s subject is a tormented and visionary artist who labors for years on a masterpiece which, when unveiled, turns out to be nothing but a mass of scribbled and scrawled lines. Picasso’s illustration of this scene—the despairing artist next to his indecipherable canvas—was, of course, an allegory of the blocked artist whose experiments have led to a dead end, but the elegantly scrawled canvas in Picasso’s etching does oddly predict not only Pollock but also the scribbled canvases of Cy Twombly.

Much of Pollock’s life and self-promotion had to do with his boxing match with Picasso. It’s great that we have Hans Namuth’s film of Pollock painting on glass shot from underneath, but it might seem as if he were acceding too easily to the demands of the media if you didn’t know it was an echo of Picasso painting with light on the beach at night in the documentary Le Mystère de Picasso. Which is, no doubt, why Pollock suffered Namuth’s dopey directions and interruptions. Pollock starts to paint and Namuth (in the movie) says: "You need to take more time looking [at the painting before painting], like you're thinking." As if Pollock has to pretend to think before he paints (even if he doesn't actually think before he paints) because that would make a better documentary! Pollock looks absolutely nonplussed. Hans, you dolt, don’t you know that Ab Ex painters don’t think before they splatter—that’s why they’re called action painters, hel-lo-o? Finally, when Pollock finally gets going, Namuth says, "Cut! We ran out of film!" Paintus interruptus, to say the least.

Pollock is surrounded by busy-bodies and theorists who think they know what he should be doing. For such a maverick as Pollock, the ubiquitous presence of the ideologically possessed art critic and insane control freak Clement Greenberg is a great comic element (his nutty theories about flatness in painting are hilariously lampooned in Tom Wolfe’s The Painted Word). Like some Jewish mother out of Icelandic myth, Greenberg in life and in the movie hovers over Pollock, nudging, cajoling, meddling, and ordering him around. Greenberg: "You're retreating into imagery again!" Or: "I like this one. Paint 8 or 10 of those." An increasingly agitated Pollock replies: "I'll go fix it for you. So it's the blue that's bothering you? And you want the color quiet?"

More than anything, Jackson Pollock wanted to make it. He was brash and self-confident, as well as riddled with self-doubt and feelings of inferiority. He goes from " I feel like a clam without a shell ... I feel like a phony" to "I’m the only painter worth looking at in America—there's really no one else." There’s an incredibly pathetic scene in Pollock in which he reads a review in an Italian magazine to his family in Italian, a language neither he nor anyone else in the room understands. It’s as if he thinks they’ll actually be interested in hearing the words anyway. Look Ma, they’re talking about me in Italian, fer chrissakes!

Pollock was the first American Art Star and was treated, even during his lifetime, as if he were a movie star (the only kind of fame there is in America). He lived his life as if it were a movie, which is part of the problem in making a movie about him. Pollock was treated by both the public and the press like a movie star—in other words someone who fulfilled the audience’s preconceptions (from the movies!) about how an artist of genius behaved. And Pollock played the role of the tormented, self-destructive genius to the hilt, even, some would say, reflexively writing his own melodramatic car crash death.

How you gonna top that, Ed? Harris is already crazy when the film begins (he’s drunk, he’s screaming, he’s got the shakes). It’s as if Pollock (the painter, not the movie), always in the third act of his own La Boheme, almost defies further dramatization.

Pollock is a reverent, intelligent treatment of Pollock’s life—Ed Harris, the director and star, went to heroic lengths to get things right—he even learned how to paint like Pollock, building a studio at the end of his property where he could practice dripping on a large scale (now, that would be a fun thing to have—an Ed Harris Pollock!)—but to hell with all the five-finger exercises, the cloning, and the quest for authenticity.

If anything, the movie is too earnest. Jackson Pollock is all about obsession. He dreams about his brothers trying to push him off a cliff. He rages and picks fights. At Peggy Guggenheim’s party, he pisses into the fireplace. What a naughty fellow! And then fucks her. He’s a character ("Jackson Pollock!") in an overwrought movie about a turbulent artist (himself!). He may have been over-the-top in his self-dramatizations, but his family life was truly pathologically troubled and his own inner turmoil real. All are mesmerizingly recorded in Jeffrey Potter’s oral biography of Pollock, To a Violent Grave.

Although Harris was nothing if not obsessed with his Pollock project (he spent ten years developing it), he isn’t in the end a true match for Action Jackson. True, he looks eerily like Pollock, especially the late Pollock, but "Ed Harris the Actor" is almost always the opposite of Pollock—a calm, often cynical, tough guy, cool under fire (John Glenn). Maybe Sean Penn—who doesn’t look remotely like Pollock—would have made a better Jack the Dripper. Someone who we know is going to erupt sooner or later, someone who equates temperament with genius and breakthrough. Someone whom the camera loves. That is, someone with something behind the eyes.

And you need that eruptibility if, for nothing else, to offset the inevitable set pieces. There’s no way around the great, clunking cliché epiphany of the Drip you know is coming. The breakthrough moment when Jackson notices his paint, uh, dripping from his brush onto the floor lunges into the story like Pollock on a bender. Lee Krasner (brilliantly played by Marcia Gay Harden) starts out independent, interesting, almost Lili-Taylor-as-Valerie-Solanis, but ends up the housewife and interpreter, taking care of him, explaining him to critics, answering the phone: "I'm sorry, he's painting right now" (he's not). Or, when an interviewer asks him who he likes (almost no one), she answers, "De Kooning, Kandinsky, El Greco, Goya, Rembrandt." It’s a good answer, but it’s hers.

There is a great scene just before he begins a painting for Peggy Guggenheim in which the screen goes blank for ten seconds or so—like a blank canvas—echoing the famous opening shot of Alan J. Pakula’s All the President’s Men in which the screen stays blindingly white for some 40 seconds before a gigantic typewriter key smacks into the glowing white rectangle.

Note to self & Academy of Motion Pictures: No more artist bio pics. Make that, no more bio pics, period. In which life stories of our heroes and heroines are reduced to the most absurd, flat-footed clichés.

Okay, I bought Charles Laughton as Rembrandt not only because he was a great actor (and tormented artist himself) but because his was an endearing, lumbering portrayal of the put-upon artist—broody, beefy, and brilliant in a mole-like way. The movie even looked like it had been lit by Rembrandt. Laughton was also a star of equivalent magnitude (in all senses of the word) to Rembrandt, which Ed Harris is not. He’s a good actor, but lacks some indefinable magnetic shellacking that a star always flaunts. You need a star to play a star because you can only light up a charismatic character like Pollock with star light. Ed Harris just doesn't reverberate with meanings. Robert de Niro as Travis Bickel (an anonymous assassin) has more sides to his character than Ed Harris as Jackson Pollock.

Kirk Douglas as Van Gogh in Lust For Life was just silly and camp. The only thing to be said about Charleton Heston as Michelangelo in The Agony and the Ecstasy is that he did have the nose for the part. Maybe he would have done a better job playing that Renaissance munitions expert and arms dealer, Leonardo da Vinci. Anthony Hopkins played Picasso as an antique dealer in the Merchant-Ivory travesty—and we won’t even mention those ham-fisted fake Picassos. (My sister for a while lived next door to an old German artist whose claim to fame was that he’d painted the Van Goghs in Lust For Life.) My personal favorite in the Great Artist Bioflic Department, possibly because it doesn’t try too hard, is Alec Guinness as Gulley Jimson (meant to be the eccentric English painter Stanley Spencer) in The Horse’s Mouth (paintings by—what is that painter’s name?). Yup, a comedy about a starving artist, that’s what everyone should see when they start to take themselves too seriously. Jackson! Ed! Get over yourselves! Think of the starving Armenians!